I have been working on a detailed video to explain you the latest information about this…

So until that video comes… I highly recommend you to watch the next video before reading my article to save some time.

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Kartra Avis but first, what is Kartra?

Kartra is a collection of essential business tools that you need to run any online business, all nicely integrated into a single platform.

It is the brain child of Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins, two well-known marketers who have successfully launched WebinarJam as one of the premier online webinar tools out today.

So you know right off the bat this this tool is going to be a little different than some from the past. But it gets even more interesting.

Pulling in the big guns

While Mike and Andy surely could have launched the product themselves, they got help.

And oh boy, the help is high-quality.

Frank Kern, a direct response advertising legend, decided to get in on the action.

He provides a number of training modules and seminars (which would cost thousands of dollars to attend in person) for FREE with the Kartra Academy – the built-in training portal for Kartra users.

That would normally be enough, but then they sweetened the pot with “Done-for-you” campaigns. I’ll be going deep into this feature later in the review.The Bottom LineKartra is a company that is backed by an already successful software company (Genesis Digital), and have the nod of approval from one of the most respected advertising names in the industry.

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s dive into the features!

Kartra’s Page Builder

Since Kartra is in direct competition with Clickfunnels and Leadpages (but it does so much more!) it makes sense to start with the page building function.

Kartra Avis gives you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) front end editor. From day 1 there were over a hundred pre-built page templates available to import with a single click.

The overall experience of building pages is intuitive and speedy.

Want to see me build a page from scratch?

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And here is an example of a simple opt in page I built in about 10 minutes using Kartra’s page builder (from scratch!)

Split Testing your Funnels

Split testing is all the rage around geeky digital marketers (and I’m probably the geekiest).

Kartra has a VERY powerful split testing engine. It gives you full flexibility about how you test.

Want to change just a few words in the headline? No problem.

Swap out that image for a video? Go for it.

Completely scrap the entire page design and test two wildly different pages? Go for it.

This is a breath of fresh air compared to some other page builders that only allow you to split test a single module at a time. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Kartra Avis Page Builder Pro’s

Built in Photo Library to pull stock photos and designs directly into your pages

Thousands of icons that you can search for to brighten up your sales pages

You can organize your pages into “folders” on the main interface so you can easily find any funnel

Kartra Avis Page Builder Con’s

Sometimes pages can look a little off on mobile. Alignment can be just slightly off from what you’d expect to see.

Some page builders are coming out with fancy dividers between sections. Kartra has not yet implemented this

There are a ton of page builders on the market today. Kartra is able to stand its own next to these bigger contenders, but there are definitely some features that I would like to see Kartra add.

But Kartra makes up for any short comings by providing extremely helpful sample sales copy on all their pages Kartra Avis. Instead of just giving you some icons and Lorem Ipsum text, Kartra provides full blown examples sales pages written by Frank Kern.

Not only does it show the sales copy that he has used for ads in the past, but he also will add his own commentary of WHY he wrote the thing to make you a better copywriter in the process! Just brilliant.

Another great page builder is Thrive Architect, and there is a lot of great overlap between these two tools.

Verdict: Kartra Page Builder

85%Excellent Page Builder

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Email Campaigns

This is one of those key features that you just wouldn’t expect a company to be able to pull off.

Including a full-fledged email marketing platform and CRM is no simple task, and Kartra pulls it off very well for an all in one!

Kartra’s email marketing is combined into three parts: a broadcasting tool, an automation platform, and a lead management area. Let’s take a quick look:

Email Broadcasting

The main measure of success for an email marketing tool is its deliverability rate – how often your messages land into the inbox Kartra Avis.

Kartra scores very high on this point:

Kartra’s Email Deliverability is best-in-class

I can agree with the results that this post states. After testing several email services (Active Campaign, Mailerlite, Drip), I was consistently getting my Kartra emails to deliver in the “primary” email inbox, where emails from other providers would often go to the “updates” or “promotions” tab. Great job Kartra!

You can create a variety of email types within Kartra: Plain text or beautifully designed:

You can build beautiful email campaigns with Kartra

In general, I prefer to keep my emails simple and text based, but there is one killer feature in Kartra that I break this rule for.

Look closely in the screenshot above…

See that orange countdown timer?

Oh boy that’s a killer feature!

Kartra has an incredibly tight integration throughout their platform, and this allows them to do something extremely powerful here.

You can set up a scenario where you offer a limited time bonus to recent customers.

And that deadline can be displayed dynamically between your emails, the sales pages, and any other part of your Kartra campaigns, automatically. And they always stay in sync with each other.

Have you ever been on a site where there’s a countdown timer, but as soon as you hit “refresh,” the timer resets? Yeah that’s an instant deal breaker for me, and you won’t find that with Kartra!.

Being able to connect your email marketing system with your page builder like Kartra does is no simple feat. Other solutions out there cost ~$70 per month for this one feature alone!

Automations

Automations are one of those things that can intimidate new marketers, but once you have figured them out – they are an essential part of your strategy.

Creating “sub sequences” within your automations to create complex paths they can take, while keeping it visually simple to manage

Solid analytics to show how each email and step within your automation is performing

Want to see a ton of email features? Check out my in depth tutorial on automations and email marketing.

Managing your leads

Under the campaigns area of Kartra you can drill down and manage your leads deeply.

You can:

View all their tags and information

View an entire history of their customer journey: What pages they viewed, which forms did they opt in on, what help desk tickets did they submit, which videos they watched and how much, which products did they buy or refund… you get the picture

Add or remove any information about them

Grant them access to products or provide refunds

There is a ton you can do in this area, but the key takeaway is that it is directly tied into to the entire platform, so it gives you super powers when it comes to selling.

Selling superpowers

Imagine you get an email from a subscriber and they want you to drop the price for them.

Before you just say no and move on, you can click into their lead history and see their entire journey.

Maybe you find out that they have a particular interest in a topic and you can offer them a cheaper product (with an upsell of course).

Instead of simply saying “no,” by having context around the user, you can maneuver your way to the sale.

Kartra Email Pro’s

Fantastic email deliverability

Deep integration between emails and pages to allow you to put countdown timers directly in your emails

Complete “customer journey” view of your leads – from the moment they sign up you can see everything they have done between your pages, videos, emails, memberships, and help desk

Kartra Email Con’s

The visual automation builder isn’t as refined as Drip’s or Active Campaigns. A few more clicks are required to dive into each step.

There is currently no way to remove a small “Kartra” logo from the bottom of your emails. This is a feature that is common for “free” versions of email software but I have never seen it forced on a paid tier.

Their pricing model limits the number of emails you can send at each level, and charges a little more for any overages. On the Silver plan (which I recommend) you can send 125,000 emails per month. Not ideal if you like to email your list daily.

Kartra does a great job with their email marketing. I honestly feel that it competes with the big boys when you consider all the data sharing that Kartra can do between their emails and your funnel pages.

Verdict: Kartra Email Campaigns

90%Powerful, Integrated, Email Marketing

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a try for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Email Opt In Forms

Before you can start emailing your leads… you need to generate leads!

And that’s where Kartra’s opt in forms come in, and they also have a few tricks up their sleeves Kartra Avis.

Let me review the design options and the functionality and features of the opt in forms separately:

Kartra opt in form design

With Kartra you can design several types of opt in forms:

In line forms

“Click Pop” forms linked to buttons

Slide-in forms

Pop ups on exit intent

Banners at the top/bottom of pages

Naked HTML forms without design (to integrate with other tools if you want)

Kartra continues to make things easier for newbie marketers by providing templates for each of their forms.

And once you select your templates and make your tweaks, you’re ready to start building your list!

Kartra Opt In Features

Kartra has some nice tricks up its sleeve. Check it out:

Kartra can pre-load your info!

I’m not sure if you realize how important this gif is. Let me explain.

Smart opt In Forms

As a managed solution, Kartra has clients everywhere, in every vertical.

Because of this, they are able to semi-share cookie data for their opt in forms.

What this means is that if a reader opts in to a DIFFERENT Kartra Avis user’s form, and later on comes across yours…

His information will be pre-loaded in, so all he has to do is click the “sign up” button!

This is important, because it removes one more piece of friction in the sign up process, which should result in greater conversions!

Embedding forms

Having these forms show up all over your Kartra funnel pages is great, but what if you already have a WordPress blog?

No worries!

When you build out a form in Kartra, it will give you a small one line piece of code that you can place on your blog or anywhere else online, and that form will display just as it should.

What’s even better is that if you accidentally made a typo or what to change the design, you never have to adjust the snippet of code on your site! Changes are kept in sync between your blog and Kartra at all times. Very convenient.

So let’s recap:

Kartra Email Opt In Pro’s

Good selection of opt in designs

Simple drag-and-drop editing

Can add automations directly into the opt in sign up forms Kartra Avis

Syncs readers names and emails across any Kartra user’s form so they don’t even have to enter it in!

Can embed forms into your blog or other websites

Can quickly plug in forms to your existing landing pages without having to do any design work on the form itself.

Kartra Email Opt In Con’s

Cannot easily split test opt in form designs like you can with Thrive Leads.

Exit intent currently only works for Kartra pages. I was not able to get it to work putting an exit pop up on my wordpress site.

Going back to the 80/20 principle, Kartra’s opt in forms satisfy everything you would need to create high-converting landing pages. It doesn’t have all the options of some of the other players, but what it does, it does well.

Verdict: Kartra Opt In Forms

85% Flexible, well-designed forms

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools!Try Kartra Today14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Video Hosting

Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia…. and Kartra?

That’s right, Kartra Avis now has a marketing-focused video hosting platform on the market!

Kartra’s video hosting platform brings some unique functionality made just for marketers:

Kartra Video Hosting Pro’s

Can embed videos directly on the platform

Get access to detailed analytics like average length watched, at what point your people are dropping off, etc

See every video watched by your subscribers in their customer journey Kartra Avis

In-video actions: require your viewers to social share, subscribe, or perform any other action to continue watching the video.

Organize your videos into folders for easy access

Quickly embed your videos into Kartra pages – no hunting down URLs

Kartra Video Hosting Con’s

Video buffering. It seems that when there is a lot of usage, videos can pause to catch up.

Storage limitations. On the Silver Plan (which I recommend) you have 125GB of bandwidth for video playing. Because of this limit, I recommend you only host your critical videos (opt in videos, sales page videos, one time offers, etc) on Kartra, and use Vimeo for any membership videos. You should compress your videos before uploading.

Kartra’s video hosting platform offers some interesting features like their call to action’s in the middle of videos, but at the end of the day, I was not terribly impressed by this tool.

Having to compress my videos before uploading was an extra step and a hassle. I don’t care for the limitations on bandwidth, so I use the hosting sparingly.

But for optimizing your funnel and conversions, their hosting platform does offer some great features.

Verdict: Kartra Video Hosting

60%Powerful, but limited video hosting

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Products

The entire point of Kartra Avis is to sell products, right? Luckily, Kartra has some very in depth options for selling digital products.Want to sell digital products? Kartra Avis has said they are most interested in supporting the sale of digital goods (ebooks, courses, memberships, consultations), and do not have physical products on their roadmap. If you would like to sell physical products as well, I would recommend you check out Thrivecart or Woocommerce.

Kartra has an easy to use wizard that walks you through the entire process of configuring your products Kartra Avis.

Is it a download or a membership?

Will it have an upsell, downsell, or bump component?

And will it have coupons?

Will you accept affiliates?

How to tag your customers?

There are so many options, that it’s best to just start with their “Done for you” Campaigns and learn about the settings before you dive in head first into product creation.

Hosting your files on Kartra

Want to store an ebook to sell? Or maybe a cheat sheet to offer as a sign up bonus?

Kartra gives a simple file-hosting system for you to keep all your downloadable files together and easy to access.

Selling your products with Kartra

Kartra allows you to customize your check out pages starting with their well-designed templates.

They also allow you to customize the checkout flow. Meaning, if someone purchases, what URL with an upsell offer do you want to send them to?

And if they say no to the upsell Kartra Avis, do you want to offer a downsell? You have complete creative freedom with designing your own custom funnel.

To accomplish the one click upsells, Kartra accepts Stripe and Paypal payment methods, which covers the majority of online transactions.

Analytics with Kartra Selling

You can also set up special tracking links for any links you’d like.

A great practice is to set up a special link for your sales page, and then run some split tests on it to see which converts higher. All this can be done in just a few clicks with Kartra.

So there’s a lot you can do with Kartra – let’s review:

Kartra Products Pro’s

Kartra Avis Can host all your products directly on Kartra’s servers

Can offer upsells, downsells, and bump offers

Customizeable checkout pages (with templates to choose from)

Tracking links to help you monitor your products sales

Easy dashboard on the home page of Kartra to show you how your sales are going

Can take one time payments, monthly payments, trials, anything you can imagine!

Kartra Products Con’s

Can’t sell physical products

Paypal purchases still redirect you off the site to checkout, which can impact customer experience

Verdict: Kartra Product Manager

80%Everything you need to sell Digital Products

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Memberships

Selling online courses is a booming industry, and there are some major players already in the marketplace:

Teachable

Thinkific

WordPress solutions (Learndash, LifterLMS, Thrive Apprentice)

Memberships are a great way to make the learning process easier, more premium feeling, and more beneficial for you Kartra Avis.

So how does Kartra stack up as a membership solution?

You can create dynamic membership areas simply with Kartra

Kartra Memberships Pro’s

Kartra Memberships are drag-and-drop easy

Can quickly create lessons and modules for your courses

Can embed videos from any preferred host, and even upload audio lectures for learning on the go

Since everything is under Kartra’s roof, you can put advertisements for your OTHER products in the sidebar of your lessons (think upsell potential)

Kartra allows you to “star” favorite lessons for your students to easily access their most-viewed sections.

It builds a nice membership portal where you can offer multiple courses or memberships, all with a single login for your user

Kartra automatically handles the techy part of integrating the purchase process with the membership access. When someone purchases access to a membership, Kartra automatically sends their login details and links to their purchase! This integration is such a time and frustration saver.

Kartra Memberships Con’s

Kartra misses some of the engagement features that other LMS’s offer. For example, you can’t show a student what % through the course they have completed. (It does, however show you if a lesson has been viewed before or not with a visual eye icon)

Kartra offers several “themes” for their membership sites, but they all follow a very similar structure. You are limited in how you customize the layout of your membership sites.

Kartra’s membership sites is another very well implemented tool, and is perfect for entrepeneurs who want to:

Sell courses

Publish restricted content just for members

Offer group coaching behind a pay wall

Like other parts of Kartra, the membership area strips away some of the other features that best-in-class solutions have.

But when you think about what you actually NEED to run a successful membership site, you’ll see that Kartra has what you need.

Verdict: Kartra Memberships

90%Simple and powerful online courses and memberships

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Helpdesk

As your business grows and matures, it gets harder to manage all your requests through your own email inbox.

That’s where helpdesks really shine.

They allow you to create a trackable ticket system whenever your customers or visitors have questions about your business.

Moving from email management to ticket system gives you several distinct advantages:

Kartra Help Desk Pro’s

Gives your customers options (ticket, live chat, skype, phone call

Tracks the status of tickets (opened, waiting, resolved, etc) so you always know where you stand

Lets your customer rate their experience so you know if your customer service team (or you!) are doing a great job.

Kartra analytics allow you to measure the average time to completing your issues – another useful way to manage your employees as your business grows.

When someone submits a help desk ticket, you can automatically add them to your email list and provide special tags so you know they were in your help system.

As you answer common questions, you can easily create a Wiki that your customers can refer to and avoid asking the same question over and over!

Kartra Help Desk Con’s

There is currently no mobile app to do live chat on, so you have to actually have the computer open to support customers (they have said they are working on one though!)

There are some help desks that are just … prettier than Kartra’s. It’s extremely functional, but as an all-in-one, I don’t think they put the most work into designing the chat experience.

Verdict: Kartra Help Desk

80% Simple way to be there for your customers

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Calendar Review

An extremely popular high-ticket upsell for info products is private 1:1 coaching with your students. But it’s always been a mess to implement!

Emails back and forth…

Confusion around the time zone you are scheduling in…

Or bouncing people to external sites like Calendaly where savvy customers will try to continue to take your time without paying…

Kartra has once again come to the rescue with their calendar booking feature.

Let’s take a quick look:

This is a game-changing feature for Kartra users, because this scheduling feature allows you to keep your calendar under control while continuing to scale your sales funnel.

Let’s take a look at the good and the bad of the Kartra Calendar feature.

Kartra Calendar Pro’s Kartra Avis

You keep full branding control – you can use your own custom domain, logo, and color scheme on your calendar page

Offer free or paid appointments (great for upsells to info products!)

Set up your pre-defined work schedule so you never get people requesting meetings on Saturdays or during your gym-time!

Automatically send pre-meeting emails and SMS to your customers (and you) to make sure no one misses their meetings

Set up your vacation and Christmas schedule ahead of time so you never have to cancel on a client while you are visiting family

Take advanta of a team of consultants and manage them from a single dashboard.

Set up 4 different types of calendars: Consultant model (open time range great for 1 on 1 sessions), Recurring classes (pick a time slot and repeat every week/month), Gym model (set up different classes at specific times), or live event model (specific time and date)

Kartra Calendar Con’s

Kartra is still working on Google Calendar 2 way sync, but they have promised that it will come out soon!

Verdict: Kartra Calendar

88% Easily Sell your time without the scheduling nightmares

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Integrations Review

You may ask yourself – why do I need integrations if Kartra is an all in one platform?​

There are a number of reasons you may want to add additional integration functionality with Kartra:

Alright, so no freaking out because Kartra may not be the only tool you need in your belt. Let’s quickly review the integrations available in Kartra.

And for my more visually-minded readers, here they all are in one glorious list.

So which Kartra integrations do you need?

Of course, everyone’s situation is different, but there are a few crucial integrations to consider.

First, you will need to set up your payment gateways so you can accept money (the whole point of this thing, right?). I prefer PayPal and Stripe as that covers the majority of the US customer base, and also enables the beautiful one-click upsell functionality that Kartra is famous for.

Next – you’ll probably find some tool that you want to talk to Kartra, and that’s where Zapier comes in. With simple If this then that logic, you can set up pretty amazing automations that make your life easier using Kartra.

Finally, if you like to email your list every day, you will quickly start to rack up some overage fees if you stick to the stock email limits with your account.

However, the simple work around is to integrate with a transactional email system like Sendgrid. The way these work is basically your insurance against fees by routing your email newsletters using their servers, not Kartra’s.

For about $10 per month, you can get an additional 40,000 emails to blast to your leads – which is a fantastic rate for those who like to keep in touch with their contacts.

So let’s summarize:

Kartra Integrations Pro’s

Even though Kartra has everything most online businesses will need – they also offer a ton of 3rd party integrations to ensure you always have a direct connection to your tools.

Connecting to email services like Postmark and Sendgrid can save you money if you like to send a high volume of emails every month.

Integration with Zapier means that pretty much anything under the sun can be accomplished (with enough creativity)

You have plenty of options to collect payments effectively and cheaply

Kartra Integrations Cons

I would like to see a direct WordPress plugin for Kartra Avis to have better control over how your Kartra email opt in forms display on your blog posts (like Thrive Leads can do)

Verdict: Kartra Integrations

95%Connect Kartra anywhere you need

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Kartra Pricing Kartra Avis

After all those features Kartra Avis, you’ve got to be wondering about price.

Don’t worry, Kartra is incredibly affordable considering the incredible number of features it allows you to do in one package:

Let’s take a quick look at the Silver annual plan, and breakdown why $139 per month is an incredible price.

Kartra Avis for this quick comparison, let’s put together a set of tools that will provide comparable functionality as Kartra does.

Page Builder – Lead Pages ($48 per month)

Email Marketing – Drip ($246 per month for 12,500 contacts)

Shopping Cart – Samcart ($99 per month)

Membership Platform – Teachable ($79 per month)

Lead Capture Forms – Lead Pages (already added in)

Helpdesk – Intercom ($87 per month)

Kartra Avis Total cost of this stack? An incredible $559 per month. That’s just over 4 times the cost of the silver Kartra plan…

$400 per month you could be investing into Facebook ads or to pay your support team – instead of spreading out into a ton of tools which become difficult to manage and integrate.

But wait a second… is there a catch?​

I will be honest, Kartra is a great platform, but the tools above are specialists. That means that they are designed for one purpose, and do it very well.

So don’t expect Kartra Avis’s help desk feature to be better than Intercom’s offering, or for Kartra’s email marketing service to be better in every way than Drip’s (although in some cases, I do think Kartra’s is more advanced!).

What you are getting is an incredible value that provides incredible peace of mind and efficiency because of it’s integrated nature.

By overlooking some of the fancy features of the individual specialists, you will in turn gain a powerful platform that can take your business to new heights (without the tech stress!)

Eliminate Tech Headaches

Give Kartra a spin for 14 days for only $1 and say goodbye to your tangled web of online business tools! Try Kartra Today 14 DAY TRIAL

Who is Kartra For?

This is the million dollar question. Is Kartra for you?

I think Kartra Avis is an excellent option for:

Entrepeneurs that already have a product idea and an existing audience Kartra Avis

People who get frustrated with the tech of tying together a ton of different systems

People who don’t necessarily want to blog every day to create traffic to their funnels

Social-media heavy influencers (Youtube, instragram, pinterest) who can send people directly from social into their funnels

Agencies who want to help local businesses expand their product selection into digital products. Kartra gives them a single service that can handle all the necessary functions (probably better than they are today).

Those who want to focus on the actual marketing customer service, and not getting stuck in the weeds with the tech.

Those who want to sell their own funnels for additional revenue (this will be huge!)

Who should avoid Kartra?

I am nervous to tell anyone to completely ignore Kartra.

After all, $1 for a full 14 day trial is entirely risk free, and you may find that it pushes all the buttons for you in an easy package.

However, here are some people that I could see struggle with Kartra Avis:

People who like to keep 100,000+ people on their email lists and email them regularly. Kartra is better suited for folks who keep their list clean. If your leads don’t convert after a certain point, it’s better to move them to a cheaper email provider (like Mailerlite), or unsubscribe them altogether.

People who like to email daily. Unlike other providers, Kartra puts a cap on how many emails you can send. You can always send more, but the additional emails will cost you.

People who HAVE to have physical products to sell. This is clearly made for digital products only.

Kartra – An All In One Worth Watching

What’s your take on Kartra? Do you think it is the best thing since sliced bread?

Here at Markeazy, I am a bit of a weirdo. I actually ENJOY the tinkering, the researching better tools, and the problem solving of integrations. That’s why I wrote the ultimate comparison guide to page builders.

In fact, I have helped a few businesses get their Kartra-based funnels up and running, and it has been a great process to give them a single tool and know they will be well cared for.